Adding audio to a slideshow

Here are some photos that I captured on a recent trip to mainland Mexico to asmall town called Sayulita.What I want to do is I want to put these photos together in a slideshow andI want to do that in order to showcase some of the new enhancements in the Slideshow module.So we will be working from this folder titled sayulita.Well, let's go ahead and navigate over to the Slideshow module.Now here's the good news.Not a lot has changed inside of the Slideshow module.What I want to do is just highlight some of the more significant changes.For the most part a lot of the things that we are going to see here in the panelsare identical to Lightroom 2.

Well, if we make our way down to Overlays, one of the things you are going tonotice is I have an Identity Plate turned on, and this is my name here withthe word photography.I will go ahead and make that a little bit bigger so you can see it.Now previously what we had to do in Lightroom 2 was we had to click and dragthis around and then resize this to try to get it to the right spot.Well there's a new feature.It's the Up and Down Arrow keys.Now those help us to get this in exactly the right spot.Now don't confuse that with the Left and Right Arrow keys because those take usthrough these different images, where Up and Down is the one that modifies theposition of this little watermark here. Well great.

Well now that we have that in a particular location, again Left Arrow key takesus through our images.Another new feature we have in Lightroom is the ability to add a watermark.So if I click to turn this on, you'll notice that I have one watermark selected,which is a faint copyright symbol over the images.We will see that regardless of what image we are on.Now we can also choose other watermarks, like this one which is a smallcopyright in the lower left-hand corner over there.And again it gives us the ability to have different types of watermarks.

Typically, when you are creating a slideshow you don't necessarily need toinclude a watermark like this.So what I want to do is talk about watermarking where it's a little bit morerelevant and that is in the Web module.So we'll talk more about watermarking later, yet I did want to point out thatit's possible to add those here.Well, let's go ahead and turn that off and then close this panel and wewill make our way down.The new feature that's most important to the Slideshow module is how weplayback these images.

We now have the ability to select songs in a way, especially on a Mac, that isn'tconnected to iTunes.So if I want to select an MP3, all I need to do is click Select Music.I will select the file and go ahead and hit Choose.What that's going to do is bring the song and give me the song duration.Now currently it's showing me that this song is four minutes long.That's a pretty long song.If I want my images to match exactly to this particular audio file, what I cando is go ahead and hit Fit to Music.It's going to then change the slide duration so that each slide is up or visiblelong enough so that that matches the overall song.

One of the things that you are going to soon discover is that, well yeah youprobably are going to need to edit or cut or slice down your audio.So there are some other great titles on the lynda.com Library about working with audio.Now of course what you can do is modify the overall time of the slides here andalso the fades or the transitions.You will notice that it's showing me my overall time below here of this particularslideshow, and it's updating that based on the overall slide duration.Well, the other thing that we can do once we make our way through all of theseoptions is we can finally export this as a video.

Now it's been nice to have slideshows, but in all reality not many people usethis feature. But they will now.What you can do is navigate over to this button here and click on Export Video.What you can do is export this video to a number of different types of presets,and the nice thing about these presets is that each of them show you some of thedifferent ways you may want to use this particular video format.So let's say we choose 640x480.It's really good for small handheld devices and the Web, or if we go a littlebit smaller you can see this is great for your iPhone or your iPod.

So what you could do is create a little photo portfolio or for that matter a lotof photo portfolios, and then you could export them this way and include them onyour iPod or your iPhone in order to share them with others.So, all that you would need to do would be to give this a name.I will go ahead and name this one sayulita, and then simply click Export andit would create a video format that would be compatible with these different types of devices.Well, I am going to cancel out of this because I'm not actually going to export this one.The last thing that I want to point out here is that you can really get creativewith your slideshows.

This one is pretty simple, not even really that dynamic, but just keep in mindthat you can do things that are really easy to make something come to life, likeadding a different backdrop or changing the position or the size of your images.You can start to have a lot of fun with this and take a look at what yourphotographs might look like in these different contexts on these differenttypes of backgrounds.You can also modify their overall opacity so it's a little bit more faint in thebackground, and you get the gist.In some of my other training titles, I go into further details how to customizeslideshows and make them even more interesting.

So now more than ever is the time to really get a handle on how to work withslideshows, that gives you the ability to share your photographs in a completelyunique and dynamic way.

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Author

Released

6/11/2010

In Photoshop Lightroom 3 New Features, photographer and author Chris Orwig explores the enhancements that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 brings to each phase of the photographic workflow—from importing and editing, to exporting and publishing. This course details Lightroom 3's new importing and asset-management features and its significant improvements in the Develop module, including enhanced sharpening and noise reduction. Chris also shows how Lightroom 3 broadens output options, and shares workflow tips and advice for upgrading Lightroom 2 catalogs and working with images processed in earlier Lightroom versions. Exercise files are included with the course.

Topics include:

Importing and managing photos and video clips

Improving efficiency with enhanced collections

Applying sharpening and noise reduction

Mastering the enhanced adjustment brush, graduated filter, and vignette features